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The National Museum in Krakow

The large museums, like the Main Building of the National Museum, the Czartoryski Museum or the Cloth Hall are supplemented by smaller, more personal, biographical exhibitions dedicated to the greatest Polish artists that lived or created in Krakow, like the painter, playwright and poet Stanislaw Wyspianski or the composer Karol Szymanowski.

The Main Building of the National Museum has three permanent exhibitions. The most interesting one is certainly the Gallery of the Twentieth Century Polish Art, the most extensive exhibition of its kind in Poland. It contains paintings from the first period of the 20th century by artists of the modernist "Young Poland" movement.

The Cloth Hall now contains a collection of Polish art dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. Its four rooms contain works of pre-romantic and classicist painters, Polish historical panoramas of Jan Matejko, Artur Grottger or Jacek Malczewski, and the famous expressionist Frenzy of Ecstasy by Wladyslaw Podkowinski.

The Czartoryski Museum perhaps is the most famous division of the National Museum in Krakow and is still owned by the Czartoryski family. This museum contains the famous Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo Da Vinci as well as paintings by Breughel and Rembrandt. It also houses an arsenal and a library.

The Bishop Erazm Ciolek Palace, this early 16th century mansion on one of Krakow's most beautiful streets, Ulica Kanonicza, counted among the earliest and most beautiful Krakow Renaissance residences, was built by the same architects who constructed the Collegium Maius.

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Polish National Tourist Office
980 N. Michigan Ave, Ste. 1550
Chicago, IL 60611
Phone: 1 (551) 344-3057
e-mail: info.na@poland.travel